Though falling apart, Huawei is unleashing some best gadgets in recent times. The Chinese company has unveiled the new Mate 40 series handsets, which come with the powerful Kirin 9000 chipsets and Huawei’s full-fledged search engine app – Petal Search. This marks Huawei’s entrance into the competitive search market and standing against Google.
Huawei Takes on Google With Its Search Engine
The continuous US sanctions have crippled Huawei in all ways possible, forcing the Chinese company to start almost everything from scratch. While it’s making up an Android alternative called Harmony OS, it’s still needed the crucial chips for running its hardware. Thus, unable to procure chips from any company due to sanctions, Huawei is planning to move into the software business now.
Apart from building an app community, Huawei has launched Petal Search, a search engine that’ll be serving all the Huawei mobiles soon. While all the Huawei handsets will ship without Google Play Services, it needs similar services to appeal to users. After all, Google Play Services include critical platforms like Google’s Search, Maps, and Google Playstore to download millions of apps.
Thus, lacking it affects the sales of Huawei handsets drastically everywhere, especially in the western markets who rely much on Google services. Thus, to give them similar services, Huawei has launched Peta Search, which initially started as an app search service, has now extended as a full-fledged search engine.
As per GSM Arena, the enhanced Petal Search is capable of returning web search results, alongside categorizing them as Web, Images, News, and Videos. Also, users can shop and book flights on the engine too. Further, it reported that some results were provided using Microsoft’s Bing, but in areas of Spain and Turkey, Huawei did independent indexing.
While this may be as powerful as Google’s, it’s still a considerable threat. Huawei is having hundreds of millions of smartphones globally, and pushing this new search engine to all of them can threaten Google’s existing dominance in the search market. It’s just interesting to see how this drama unfolds, as Huawei gradually shifts from a hardware maker to a software provider.
